Touring opera companies embark on Wagner’s epic four-parter, The Nibelung’s Ring, at their peril. Scottish Opera almost bankrupted itself with a critically acclaimed sellout staging by Tim Albery, seen only in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Salford. So it is perhaps no surprise — if a bit of a let-down — that Opera North has just announced touring concert performances between 2011 and 2014. They will undoubtedly be welcome in recently Ringless cities such as Leeds, Birmingham and Gateshead, even if patrons won’t see complete cycles.

In Enschede, a smallish town in the east of Holland, near the German border, the Nationale Reisopera (National Touring Opera) has just launched its own staging of the Ring, but it too has had to compromise. It won’t be touring Wagner’s daunting magnum opus, which has been reserved for its new home, Enschede’s purpose-built Muziekkwartier, a handsome, medium-sized (1,000 seats) theatre with an orchestral pit equal to Wagner’s exorbitant demands. Starting at the beginning with Das Rheingold, the production will be assembled over four years, culminating in complete cycles in 2013, the bicentenary of Wagner’s birth.

NRO’s intendant, Guus Mostart, a former régisseur and sometime casting director for English National Opera, has commissioned the production from the British director Antony McDonald, whose imaginative staging of Dvorak’s Rusalka for Grange Park Opera last summer suggested a Ring director in the making. McDonald has made his mark in the UK primarily as a set designer for Albery and Richard Jones, but he also has (controversial) Scottish Opera productions of Verdi’s Aida and Saint-Saëns’s Samson and Delilah to his credit.

If his Enschede Rheingold doesn’t offer anything startlingly original in the way of a new concept, it is narrated with remarkable clarity, and his own set and costume designs are resourceful, witty and beautiful to behold.

With his dramaturge, Helen Cooper, McDonald sees the Ring — or at least aspects of it — as a projection of Wagner’s egomaniacal personality, embodied in the conflicting characters of Wotan and his Wagnerian evil twin, Alberich. In McDonald’s Rheingold, Wotan and his family are en route to their new home, Valhalla, a mountainside villa with a passing resemblance to Wagner’s Bayreuth house, Wahnfried, seen in the distance from a railway station (the costumes are mid- to late-19th-century). The scene in the depths of the Rhine, too, is terrific: Victorian-floozie Rheinmaidens cavort on a sunken vessel chased by a grubby workman Alberich, who appears through a hole in its hull.

One of the production’s most magical moments is the difficult scene in which the earth goddess, Erda, comes to warn Wotan of the ring’s deadly, destructive curse. She enters from the foyer, accompanied by a trio of young girls (her daughters, the Norns, who will reappear in Götterdämmerung) and glides across the stage singing her mesmerising music, only to disappear through the other side of the auditorium. I also liked the red-suited, bowler-hatted, chain-smoking Loge and the dull-witted, hairy-trousered giants on platform shoes. Only the schoolboy Donner, wielding a croquet mallet, strikes a parodic note, but it must be 30 years or more since the lesser gods have been taken remotely seriously by Ring directors.

The music is in the experienced hands of the Dutch conductor Ed Spanjaard, who gets remarkably accomplished playing from the Orkest van het Oosten (Orchestra of the East). The production combines Ring veterans — Harry Peeter as a hollow-sounding but authoritative Wotan, Nicholas Folwell a hectoring Alberich — with well-chosen debutants. The trio of Rheinmaidens (Hanneke de Wit, Marjolein Niels, Corinne Romijn) would grace any production in the world, as would Erin Caves's sardonic, trenchantly declaimed Loge. Anne-Marie Owens should by rights have sung Fricka in a British production by now, but this was her first go at the part, and one that whetted the appetite for her appearance in Die Walküre next year. Another Brit, previously unknown to me, is Ceri Williams, a Welshwoman based in Germany since 2002. She has the makings of a world-class Erda — sumptuous contralto notes, clear diction and statuesque deportment — if she can curb a few intonation problems. In sum, an astonishing achievement for a modestly resourced company such as the NRO.

In Amsterdam’s exquisitely proportioned (900-seat) Stadsschouwburg, De Nederlandse Opera (Netherlands Opera) presented Deborah Warner’s well-travelled staging of Dido and Aeneas (a co-production between DNO, Paris’s Opéra Comique and Vienna’s Theater an der Wien). It hasn’t been — and probably won’t be — seen in London, but a semi-staged version was performed twice last night at the Barbican Hall.

Barbican patrons will have missed Chloe Obolensky’s striking set, a 17th-century portico dimly perceived through a metallic beaded curtain, with lush greenery as a backdrop to a courtyard with a pool. Dido and her court wear period frocks, but the chorus wear modern dress and, presumably because the first Dido performance we know about was given in a girls’ school, there was a “chorus” of nonsinging schoolgirls faffing about on stage before the music started, and at various points in the action. Purcell’s opera doesn’t need them, nor does it benefit from Hilary Summers’s crudely acted pantomime Sorceress and her cackling entourage. For the dignified singing and acting of the handsome central pair, Malena Ernman’s Dido and Luca Pisaroni’s Aeneas, and William Christie’s Les Arts Florissants — always winning in this score — Warner’s Dido was worth catching, but it was marred by clever-dickery and caricature.

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